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Apple updates iBooks with narration, performance boost

Apple has today updated iBooks for iPhone and iPad to version 1.3, adding narration features and a performance boost.

The new “read-aloud” feature is intended to help children to read, according to Apple’s patch notes, and works with selected children’s books. Unlike the Amazon Kindle, which uses text-to-speech narration, iBooks read-aloud supports only human-recorded voice tracks.

By the sounds of things, it’s much like the read-aloud books available in brick and mortar stores, which uses pre-recorded voices to read sections of text to your child as they point an electronic pen at the words.

iBooks 1.3 also adds automatic audio and video play in enhanced books, makes iBooks more responsive when loading large books, and fixes a bug that was displaying pages twice.